The pages down the right hand side comprise an essay in defence of panexperientialism and should be read in order.

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Time

Within our conceptual model of the
objective world, the temporal relations between events engender the idea of "time"
as a reified theatre within which events have their existence, and (consistent
with materialism) within which such events exist whether or not they are
experienced. But the objective world itself consists of a category of the
constituents of consciousness, and in panexperientialism there is nothing other
than instantiations of consciousness. The conception of "time" consistent
with materialism, then, has no role to play in panexperientialism, even though
temporal relations still obtain between events appearing within any particular
instantiation of consciousness.

I started out by describing the field of
experience as “in constant flux”, which is as much as to say that I consider change
to be as fundamental as experience. But the way we speak about the changing
nature of experience misleads us into thinking about change in terms of our
conception of "time" - i.e. as a kind of spatialized
representation of change that divides into past and future separated by “the
present instant”. Our most successful conceptual models employ this spatialized
representation of change in order to create an explanatorily useful
four-dimensional “block universe” model of space-time (Minkowski’s contribution
to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity). But this model leads us to
conceive the cosmos as if it were frozen inside a glass block, not only devoid
of change but also devoid of any privileged “now” that could exhibit any such
change by virtue of its passage through the block. The original acknowledgement
of change becomes difficult to accommodate in this view without begging the
question. The block universe model therefore leads us to the view of time known
as eternalism in which change is considered an illusion, whilst leaving
this putative illusion without satisfactory explanation. However, the demise of
simultaneity in Special Relativity would seem a compelling reason to entertain
this view. Panexperientialism, however, entails a view of time known as presentism
in which there is only the “present instant” (the privileged “now”), and
this view is clearly in conflict with the demise of simultaneity entailed by Special
Relativity. (Finally, for completeness, the view known as possibilism
must be mentioned, which reifies the past and present but not the future, permitting
future events to be undetermined to some degree.)

Versions of materialism entail either no
instantiations of consciousness at all (eliminative materialism - a view
that dismisses consciousness as an illusion but that leaves this putative
illusion without satisfactory explanation), or a multiplicity of instantiations
of consciousness that are coordinated by their embeddedness in a more
fundamental material (i.e. non-conscious) world (a view that leaves that
embeddedness without satisfactory explanation). According to materialism, then,
the world unfolds independently of any consciousness of it, rendering the past immutable
whether or not any aspect of that unfolding was experienced. In
panexperientialism, however, there is no “material world” that exists in the
absence of any consciousness of it, and so the constituents of consciousness
are constrained only to exhibit consistency across all instantiations of
consciousness by virtue of their mutual immanence. So the all-in-all entailed
by this mutual immanence unfolds as a unified process that is complete in
itself, devoid of the unexperienced events in the past that are characteristic
of materialism. The presentism entailed by panexperientialism stands in
contrast to the eternalism entailed by Special Relativity, rendering the
Minkowski model of space-time a useful mathematical construction that reveals
its limitations down at the quantum level. (Indeed, this scenario would be
consistent with Suarez's “before-before” experiment. See appendix 1.)

In panexperientialism, “the past” consists
of nothing more than certain established states of affairs in “the present” -
i.e. in the all-in-all as it unfolds as a unified process that is complete in
itself. The upshot for panexperientialism (and in contrast to materialism) is
that, in some supposed history, any events that were not themselves
constituents of the objective world as it then appeared in some instantiation
of consciousness or other would not yet exist. Only when some correlated
event becomes actualised (in “the present”) would the possibilities for any
associated but unexperienced past event be reduced. So, for the most
part, past events would be implicit in the constituents of the all-in-all, but
there would also be possible past events that would not be
implicit in those constituents because they had never actually been part of the
objective world as it appeared in any instantiation of consciousness. Thus it
might appear that aspects of the past can be “created” in the present, and this
raises the possibility of empirical testability. (Indeed, this scenario would
be consistent with Wheeler’s “delayed choice” experiment. See appendix 1.)